Biography: George Sand is one of those phenomenal, larger-than-life figures of the romantic and excessive 19th century - maybe too phenomenal and romantic to be taken seriously.
Born Aurore Dupin, she wrote more than 90 novels, intense treatments of the restless search for the ideal, as well as 35 plays and reams of often surprisingly cool-headed autobiography. Her huge success was partly due to curiosity about the scandalously free life she led, going around Paris with lovers such as Chopin and Musset - she had a penchant for the young and tubercular - often dressed as a man.
Elizabeth Harlan, the author of this study, does not seem to like Sand. She doesn't trust her. The impression is created of a bit of a monster. Harlan's first charge on the prosecution sheet is that Sand, suspecting that her father, the aristocratic Maurice Dupin, was not really her father, tried to cover it up.
Like an inquisitor, Harlan examines Sand's writings for lies and duplicities. Poring over surviving letters between Dupin and Sand's mother, Sophie, a young woman of easy virtue from a louche milieu, she produces persuasive evidence that Dupin was absent at the probable time of his putative daughter's conception. Her candidate for paternity is instead a "family friend", Louis-Mammes Pierret, a nice fellow but ugly, and of more humble origins. Maurice Dupin died when Aurore was two and Pierret remained important in her life and affections and especially her mother's. Harlan finds euphemistic references to him in Sand's writings that she finds incriminating.
The flaw in her argument is the question of why Dupin, who would have been no less aware of his absence at the crucial time, should have chosen to marry Sophie a few months before Aurore was born. He would have felt no moral obligation - he already had a natural son whose mother he hadn't felt obliged to marry. He was in love with Sophie and she with him but he could have kept her as his mistress. It was a role she had played more than once before. But he married her and presented the baby as her granddaughter to his mother, a woman of the sternest virtue, who effectively reared her.
Harlan uses a lot of time and paper in attempting to prove that Sand's doubts on the issue gave her an identity crisis and that she concocted scenes in her autobiographical Histoire de ma Vie to prove herself a Dupin. But does it really matter? Who, let alone a fanciful writer like Sand, doesn't have an identity crisis or prefers to believe one story over another about their past? Or maybe it's that in Harlan's hands, which seem to be twitching at a pair of lace curtains like a voyeuristic hausfrau, it all seems a little prurient and makes us instinctively side with the accused. Or maybe one can't help but distrust in turn a writer who can describe the buildings of the young Aurore's convent-school as its "physical plant".
The second charge laid against Sand is that she was a bad, nay, cruel mother.
Her children, Maurice and Solange, languished at school or on her country estate at Nohant while she turned out another half dozen novels in a bohemian garret in Paris or Venice as she transformed herself into the liberated figure "George Sand". Harlan writes heart-rending homilies on the misery of "another new year" or "another birthday" endured by the children without their mother. But Sand's heart was also rent. She felt keenly the eternal conflict between motherhood and self-fulfilment, in her case the compulsion to find refuge from melancholy in writing, travel, love; but she did try to do her best for everybody. To imply that she was wrong to have included herself in the equation is retrograde and pious.
Maurice emerged well and happy from his childhood. But Solange, known as Sol, was difficult. After her marriage failed, she dismayed her mother by engaging in high-class prostitution to keep her in luxuries. Sand's neglect and ambivalence - she was describing Solange's character as "bad" from early on - are blamed for this. But if the sins of the daughters are to be visited on the mothers Sand herself deserves a little indulgence. Her own upbringing more or less mirrored Sol's. Harlan doesn't give her an inch.
Can a woman ever be good enough? As well as being a bad mother, Sand also stands accused of being a bad feminist. When the suffragist Voix des Femmes nominated her to stand for the National Assembly, she was enraged and refused the nomination. Women, she wrote contemptuously, would always vote as their husbands directed, the idea of women acting in the public sphere was against nature, and anyway the freedom to indulge in adultery and free love was what the suffragists were really after . . . It certainly looks like hypocrisy.
Harlan's explanation is that Sand wanted to keep her sense of being exceptional and her role as an honorary man for herself. A kinder interpretation might be her belief that truth and beauty and fulfilment could be found only in the far-out regions of the ideal, not in the mundane world of politics. Not exactly a practical belief but one she was devoted to.
To be kind too to Harlan, unable as she is to empathise with this unconventional, often irrational but formidably talented woman, she does reveal Sand's writings to be more than historical curiosities. And in her role as the perfect grandmother, she can find nothing to say against her. Sand was happiest in old age, freed as she saw it, from the tyrannies of "heart and womb". At Nohant, she entertained her friends, cultivated her garden and doted on her grandchildren.
Anne Haverty is a novelist